


a fire is mostly empty space

by thescrewtapedemos



Category: Electronic Dance Music RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Arson, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-09
Updated: 2017-03-09
Packaged: 2018-10-01 16:13:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,866
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10193720
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thescrewtapedemos/pseuds/thescrewtapedemos
Summary: You know what they say, right? If you can't stand the heat you get out of the kitchen.





	

**Author's Note:**

> enjoy!
> 
> xoxo

There's a house on fire across town. 

They're high enough on the hill to see it, a brilliant raging animal, and Porter’s mouth is dry. The smell hasn’t reached them yet. There’s no wind to throw the stench of burning plastic and hot metal their way. Dillon shifts in the snow, boots crunching through. 

Their breath hangs around them. Across the valley smoke is a billowing assault on the sky. 

Porter wipes his dripping nose with the back of his wrist. 

“Fuck snow,” Dillon comments. His hand is so cold in Porter's.

\--

He dreams that they’re out on the lake and it’s still the dead of winter. Everything is a flawless white plane, level and absolute.

Dillon’s got his lighter in hand, marching it across his knuckles without looking. He’s staring out, out at the white line of the ice and the blackness of the night sky. It bisects his eyes perfectly. 

Porter shifts his feet. The ice sings and it’s hollow. Inhuman and arrhythmic.

\--

School the next day is quiet.

No one looks at anyone else. They keep their heads down. The smell of burning plastic hangs around the building, pervades the classrooms. 

Dillon doesn’t look at him when he passes him in the halls. He's the loudest thing in the school, laughter that echoes down the hallways and seems to stick in the corners of the rooms he passes through. His smile is all open-mouthed. The air is a little wild with it and it sets Porter’s teeth on edge. 

He turns his eyes from Dillon’s back.

\--

He walks home with cold, wet shoes through snow so smooth and blank it gives him vertigo. There’s more falling around him in endless white noise, skittering over every nerve.

He has to go through a little stretch of forest and on days like this the black trees and limp bodies of old leaves seem to close in. 

It’s snapping and cold. The snow crunches. 

He thinks about calling Dillon.

\--

The lake ice shows through the snow stark and black and Porter thinks this is probably a dream. Dillon’s on his knees sweeping the snow aside and it’s futile with how the snow is falling so heavily but he doesn’t notice. He just keeps clearing and clearing.

“Look,” he murmurs and points down through the cleared snow. 

The ice is dark and opaque, empty as the sky above them, a perfect mirror. 

“I can’t see it,” Porter says. 

“Look,” Dillon says again. He’s still pointing.

\--

There’s little piles of ash and blackened leaves behind the bleachers. Porter pauses walking past them for lunch, nudges an ashy twig with his toe.

“What is it?” Hugo asks. He’s got an amused lifted eyebrow when Porter glances at him. 

“Nothing.”

\--

“We could leave,” Dillon says.

The backseat is too warm, hot like a summer day, stuffy with how the heater is going. The windows are up and the sweat they’ve made together shows in the steamed windows. It smells like them, sweat and salt arousal, and like sulfur. It had started with that, Porter lighting match after match and Dillon watching every one go up. His eyes are stars. 

“Yeah,” Porter murmurs against his skin. 

“We could just start driving,” Dillon says and his fingers are drumming against the dip of Porter’s spine. “You and me.”

\--

The ice crackles under Porter’s feet.

It’s the lake again and Dillon’s shuffling through the snow, heedless of the moaning beneath their feet. He’s looking for something, Porter knows with dreamlike certainty. Looking and looking, and Porter watches him shuffle in slow circles and never once look up. 

The ice sings.

\--

The snow is supposed to start melting but the wind turns and suddenly there’s another series of flurries expected, the heavy silence of impending snow in the air, and Porter can’t breathe.

He calls Dillon from his room, sneaks downstairs and out the door on silent feet. The front porch groans when he steps on it but Jeopardy is loud from the television and his mom’s already in bed anyway, his dad nearly asleep on the couch. 

Dillon’s waiting at the end of the road in his beat-up little sedan, arm out the window like he’s cooler than he is. His smiles is too big, his eyes too wide. 

“You got something in mind?” he asks as Porter slides into the passenger seat. 

“We're gonna need gas,” Porter replies.

\--

Dillon’s piling branches together and he’s not this expert in the waking world but under his dream-hands the bonfire is taking shape. A mound of dark wood stacked intricately against itself and Porter doesn’t understand the shape, only knows he can feel it phantom against his own palms.

The gas cans are bloody scarlet against the snow. 

“The ice is gonna crack,” he murmurs. Dillon’s at his side and his lighter marches across his knuckles again, back and forth, back and forth.

\--

Porter walks home and the snow is still falling. It’s still static and the sky is light enough that the flakes seem to be falling towards him from every direction. His head kind of hurts and he thinks it’s because he hasn’t really been sleeping as much as he used to.

There’s a column of smoke climbing the sky when he finally looks up, right as he’s about to turn into the woods to get home. He turns right instead of left and he knows before he even gets there, heart beating against his ribs, roaring in his ears. 

It’s a shed in the back end of someone’s expansive yard going up in a blaze that catches in the base of his throat. 

There’s a fire engine and a police car out in front of the house and a little crowd of people, standing and muttering to each other. He can’t stand to join them. He watches instead, watches the way the roof of the shed seems to drip into the rafters, the timber giving way, plastic siding melting slowly.

\--

“You have to chill the fuck out,” Porter snaps.

Dillon shrugs. He’s not looking at Porter. He’s staring into the lighter instead. It reflects back from his eyes in little licks of yellow light, paints his cheekbones in high relief. It's dark in this narrow little shed, smells like fertilizer and cleaning chemicals. They shouldn’t be playing with fire here.

Dillon looks hollowed by the lighter flame. If he opened his mouth there would be embers on his tongue. 

“It's not a big deal,” he says at last and for a long time Porter doesn't realize he's looked up, eyes on Porter now. He's too hypnotized by the flicker of yellow still reflecting in Dillon's eyes. 

“No one suspects _yet_ ,” Porter argues and his heartbeat is too loud in his ears. “They'll catch on pretty fucking quick.”

“Don't worry about it,” Dillon breathes and the lighter clicks off. 

Dillon kisses him barely tamed, searing, all flickering tongue and teeth that sting and make Porter gasp and he thinks as Dillon presses him against the wall that the fire is inside him and he’s burning up from the inside out.

\--

Dillon’s walking out, out into the whiteness of the lake, his footsteps black ice. An arrow of a line pinning him to the snow.

He keeps walking. Porter watches and his shoes are cold and wet. 

The lake is impossibly huge, he realizes slowly. Dillon is walking and walking and he looks farther and farther away and never any closer to the far shore.

\--

Porter eats lunch with Hugo and he doesn’t really pay much attention. Hugo’s used to it now. He says something about a sleepover, something about plans. Porter nods absently.

The lunchroom is cold. The light coming through the snowy windows is empty and white.

\--

“Tonight,” Dillon whispers to him. They're alone in the halls for a moment. A brief intersection of space and Porter looks at him.

They're not ready, he wants to say. He knows they're as ready as they can be. 

He nods and keeps walking. He wants to believe Dillon's eyes follow him.

\--

This time they watch from the end of the street, under a bush in the wet snow. Too close and they don't care, they can't care. Shaking with cold and adrenaline and Dillon’s hand is tight in Porter’s. Stiff fingers, cold palms.

They both smell like gasoline. The fire crackles. 

“It should be louder,” Dillon whispers to him and he nods, convulsive, they’re both shaking so hard. 

Something glass smashes inside the house. There are sirens in the distance and Porter can’t breath, his heart is in his throat and his eyes are stinging. 

“S’beautiful,” he whispers back and when he glances over Dillon’s watching him. 

His eyes are dark, pupils huge. 

“Love you,” Dillon breathes and his cold fingers are tipping Porter’s jaw up to kiss him.

\--

School smells like gasoline again and it’s driving Porter a little crazy. He can smell it on himself and he’s just not sure if he’s imagining it or not. If the trailing scent of diesel when he turns his head is real.

Dillon brushes by in the hall. He smells like matches. 

Porter turns his eyes away.

\--

He's standing opposite Dillon and for once when Porter looks at him he cracks the plane of the snow, splitting the careful divide of white and black. The lake is crying.

“The ice is cracking,” Dillon says. 

They don’t move.

\--

“You don't want to leave,” Dillon says and Porter shrugs.

The little fire is spitting at their feet. Too close to the side of Dillon's car and neither of them care. Sitting sideways in the backseat, legs out the door, Dillon's hand at his waist the only real thing. 

He licks his lips. They taste like smoke and rich carbon. 

“I wanna finish school,” he says and his voice is thin. 

Dillon's lips finds the curve of his shoulder. 

“Uh-huh,” he murmurs against Porter’s skin and the fire spits another mouthful of sparks.

\--

He's on his knees in the snow and he's looking for something, sweeping the snow aside, black ice under his aching frozen fingers again and again.

He can't remember what he's looking for. 

“Sorry,” Dillon says.

\--

Porter wakes up and the air smells like burning plastic.

He thinks probably it's real and it follows him down the stairs and out the door, onto the bus. Everyone is silent and Porter looks out the window. 

The sky is clear. Pale, innocent blue.

\--

“Everyone’s so weird today,” Porter says and his voice doesn’t come out right. Hugo doesn’t seem to notice. He's digging through his bagged lunch.

“Guess you didn’t hear the dude’s dead,” Hugo says idly. “They found the body.” 

Porter blinks at him, surfacing briefly. Hugo’s voice is suddenly real. 

“The one that’s been setting all the fires,” Hugo clarifies and Porter blinks again. 

“What?” he asks. His own voice comes out so normally this time. 

“Don’t know that you knew him. His name's Dillon, he was in our grade,” Hugo says. Takes a sip of water. He pauses, shrugs. “Everyone's said it looked like he got caught in one of his own fires.”

Porter looks out the window. The sky is blue and empty.


End file.
